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Sunday, April 15, 2001 By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette
What Julia is to America, Rania is to Pittsburgh.
Cook. Teacher. TV personality. Wit. These are two women truly at home on the range, and among food-lovers, Julia Child and Rania Harris hardly even need a last name.
Julia is in her glorious 80s, Rania just turned a fabulous 50. Both love butter and hate cutting corners when it comes to great food.
Although Julia seldom gets much closer to Pittsburghers than a television rerun or one of her beloved cookbooks on their kitchen shelves, Rania and her first-rate food are accessible. Last week, the Mt. Lebanon cooking teacher and owner of Rania's Catering shared her cooking secrets and her recipes with more than 225 people at "Shady Side Cooks! with Rania."
The benefit -- previous headliners were cookbook writer Sarah Leah Chase and chef Greg Alauzen of the Steelhead Grill, Downtown -- was sponsored by the Parent Association of Senior School of Shady Side Academy, where Rania's son Stephen, the youngest of her four children, is a senior. In the fall, he will attend Tufts University.
Says Rania in her warm-up remarks: "I've been paying tuition since 1989."
Like Julia, Rania will never be accused of not taking a stand for what she believes in. Like butter: "Don't presume to bring margarine in your house. It's fake and it's ugly and it's gross."
She does stop short of banning it from the earth -- but only under doctor's orders.
"I'm not out to kill Greater Pittsburgh. I walk, I exercise, I'm not skinny, like her (she points to Susan Carr, her "Vanna White" of 16 years), but I'm not obese. I don't fry anything. I grill, I broil, I bake."
In under an hour, Rania demonstrated how to prepare a beautiful array of food, including a bisque that could be served hot or cold.
She told this soup story: In 1970, when she was a 19-year-old newlywed, while her husband attended a Greek Orthodox Clergy-Laity conference, she and other spouses were invited to lunch in a fancy New York apartment in the Hotel Pierre. The first course was vichyssoise. "I turned to the woman next to me and whispered, 'Somebody ought to let the hostess know that this soup is stone cold.' She said, 'Aren't you adorable!'"
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Since then, "I've never been a devotee of cold soup."
Rania sprinkled rock-ribbed opinions and helpful tips while preparing a meal she described as "user-friendly" from-scratch cooking at its best. The menu, later replicated by the Fox Chapel Golf Club, featured Creamy Tomato Bisque (she added lump crab meat), Mango Chicken Salad in Brioche, a show-stopper; Rania's Asparagus Salad, featuring the spring bounty of asparagus plus some surprisingly good strawberries; and Falling Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Sauce, which -- to everyone's shock -- lived up to its name.
As with a dinner party for a few of her closest friends, there were tiny glitches, which truly showed what the cook was made of. The chocolate dessert was perhaps the most inspiring of all, proving once and for all her comment:
"Cooking is an art, baking is a science."
Rania is a grand master of the bounce-back. As she was putting together the Creamy Tomato Bisque -- yes, honey, the recipe calls for heavy cream -- some alert would-be cook in the back of the room noticed that her ingredients didn't jibe with the ones in the recipe booklet. Without missing a beat, she began reciting the ingredients for the soup she was making.
"This other recipe -- about the only difference is the carrots -- is a bonus for you."
Her final step in the soup is adding cream.
"Butter and cream are OK. I am the queen of cream."
If we understand her, and we think we do, Rania believes the great table rests on four solid legs: fresh food, well prepared, made with the best ingredients you can afford, and . . . having the courage to create.
"Don't be afraid," she says. "People are afraid of pastry, afraid of pie crust, afraid of bread dough. Don't be afraid. It's not hard."
The salad was simple, but there were cautions. Follow this order for dressing the greens, asparagus and strawberries: Vinegar. Extra-virgin olive oil. Goat cheese. "Add the oil before the vinegar and it creates a shield to keep the vinegar from penetrating the leaves, which you don't want. Add the vinegar after the cheese, and you've got brown cheese."
"I collect olive oils and vinegars the way some people collect shoes."
The television-savvy cook, who once showed how to create delicious dishes in five-minute demonstrations on WTAE-Channel 4 -- before her segment was canceled when the station got a new news director -- shared how stress-free cooking can be. At the height of her stint at the station, her page of the WTAE Web site was getting 30,000 hits a month.
When she was taping her TV demonstrations, she says, everybody was always telling her "Hurry up!" When she met viewers they'd say, "You're great, but you talk too fast."
Rania laughed.
If the new half-hour cable cooking show she has in the works comes to pass, maybe there will be a little more time for contemplation. Unlike many chefs' shows, hers will probably have the list of ingredients scrolling along the bottom of the screen. The other guys, she says, don't do that because they want to sell you their cookbook.
"You know the difference between a cook and chef? Chefs never clean up after themselves. A cook always does."
Not every cook would create her own bread bowl for the salad, as Rania did. Quickly, too, though, because, like the magic of television, the dough did its rising offstage.
Rania joked about the number of eggs in the rich bread, which was beautiful to behold, whether baked in individual brioche pans (she suggested buying the pans at Penn Fixture & Supply in the Strip; $29 for five) or making into braided loaves.
"Let's see, there are five egg yolks, but there are 16 brioches, so that's only about one-quarter of an egg per piece. We can afford that."
Later, she suggested substituting low-fat mayonnaise in the chicken salad -- was she serious? "Of course it's only 2 tablespoons," she said, reality setting in.
"You can say no to bread and chocolate. But what possessed you? Why would you?"
The step that drew the most questions was the mango in the salad: where to buy it, how to cut it. It's available at most supermarkets, and she suggested cutting it into wedges, separating it from its pit, then peeling it. "In other words, don't peel like an apple."
"Don't use that canned mango -- it's not a good thing."
She tried to dispel the mystery of yeast.
"Why do we proof the yeast? Because your yeast may be dead. Yeast dies of old age. We add a little sugar and water to prove it's alive. You watch the bubbles form -- and you know you're safe."
"Sweet butter is unsalted butter. Never cook with salted butter. If you want to add some salt later, fine."
She made the bread in a large Cuisinart, though it can be done in a heavy-duty mixer -- Rania's KitchenAid is a stunning red. To tell when dough has risen properly: "Put your finger in the dough and remove it. If the dough hasn't closed up the hole, it's ready."
Rania was rolling the bread dough into "ropes" when someone asked, "What if it breaks?" Pinch it together again, "and don't tell anybody."
She coated the dough with egg glaze using a paint brush with natural bristles. "Buy one with dark bristles, then if one comes off, it's easy to see."
To tell when bread is baked: "Smell it. Tap it. When it sounds hollow, it's done."
"I only insist on a few things -- one of them is you have to have fresh herbs, or if you're Martha Stewart, herbs (she pronounced it like the man's name).
Rania had never watched Martha Stewart until a recent trip to the Carolinas. "I loved her show."
She has little time to watch TV at home. She typically works 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in her catering, food consulting, and Rania's To Go takeout place in Mt. Lebanon. She also does event coordinating.
When she hits the front door of her home, it's to pull on another apron to cook dinner. "I love cooking!"
The family, including her lawyer husband, their son and her 83-year-old mother, gets a home-cooked meal most every night. Rania is the rare person whose vocation is also her avocation.
"The best way to grocery-shop is to go once a day." (Groans ricochet the room.)
If there was a crowning moment in her "Shady Side Cooks!" presentation, it was the Fallen Cake that didn't so much fall as degenerate into a beautiful pool of chocolate.
Baked in an oven not her own, the souffle-like cakes came to the table ready to fail. "It wasn't baked long enough," she said, as the cake spread out on the plate.
She didn't fall apart, she just returned the rest of the batch to the oven, and soon a picture-pretty presentation was taken around to show at the luncheon tables.
The competent cook bounces back, and we were reminded of a story about Julia Child and a fallen chocolate souffle when Julia supposedly quipped, "We'll just put it in a pretty bowl and call it the most delicious pudding we've ever tasted."
Whether we're cooking with Julia or Rania, we enjoy the ride. And the chocolate.
To reach Rania for cooking classes, catering or event planning, call 412-531-2222.
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